Partnerships and projects

Covering a wide variety of products, tools, and technologies, the Wellcome Genome Campus supports globally important partnerships and projects in genomics and computational biology.

Partnerships and collaborations

100,000 Genomes Project

The 100,000 Genomes Project will sequence genomes from around 70,000 National Health Service (NHS) patients, focusing on individuals with rare diseases or cancer. The project is managed by Genomics England, an organisation established by the Department of Health specifically for this purpose. Genomics England aims to bring benefit to patients, build capability in the burgeoning area of genomic medicine, and advance medical research. The sequencing operations for the 100,000 Genomes Project are based in a new, world-class sequencing hub on Campus.

ELIXIR

ELIXIR is a pan-European infrastructure for the sharing of biological data, funded through sustainable contributions from national member states and the European Commission. The goal of ELIXIR is to orchestrate the collection, quality control and archiving of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments. Some of these datasets are highly specialised and would previously only have been available to researchers within the country in which they were generated.

ELIXIR Directorate and technical staff are based at the ELIXIR Technical Hub, alongside the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in a purpose-built facility that includes an Industry and Translation suite, offering space for collaboration with industry partners.

Open Targets

Open Targets is a unique partnership between the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL-EBI and pharmaceutical companies including GSK and Biogen. It brings to bear the most cutting-edge genomic research and computer science to more precisely identify drug targets early on in drug-development.

Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is a joint initiative between the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Imperial College London, focusing on the utility of pathogen whole genome sequencing for the global surveillance of disease. Initial aims are to produce and provide data for global public health use through intuitive applications which should enable decision making and monitoring of antimicrobial resistance, one of the greatest threats to public health that we face.
http://www.pathogensurveillance.net/

Deciphering the Mechanisms of Developmental Disorders (DMDD)

The Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) study aims to find out if using new genetic technologies can help doctors understand why patients get developmental disorders. To do this the project has brought together doctors in the 24 Regional Genetics Services, throughout the UK and Republic of Ireland, with scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The DDD study involves experts in clinical, molecular and statistical genetics, as well as ethics and social science. It has a Scientific Advisory Board consisting of scientists, doctors, a lawyer and patient representative, and has received National ethical approval in the UK.

The DDD study is jointly funded by the Health Innovation Challenge Fund – a parallel funding partnership between the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department of Health – and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and is supported by the NHS National Institute for Health Research.

Flatworm Functional Genomics Initiative (FUGI)

FUGI is a consortium funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to develop game-changing research tools for the study and manipulation of parasitic flatworm species responsible for the devastating diseases echinococcosis (hydatid disease) and schistosomiasis (bilharzia). The consortium involves researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Würzburg, Germany, The George Washington University, USA, UT Southwestern Medical Centre, USA, University of Giessen, Germany and University of Aberystwyth, Wales.

HipSci

HipSci brings together diverse constituents in genomics, proteomics, cell biology and clinical genetics to create a UK national induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell resource and use it to carry out cellular genetic studies.

Between 2013 and 2017 the initiative aims to generate over 500 iPS cell lines from healthy volunteers and several hundred lines from individuals with genetic disease. It will then use these cell lines to discover how genomic variation impacts on cellular phenotype and identify new disease mechanisms.

HipSci is funded by the Wellcome Trust and MRC

EMTRAIN

A platform for education and training covering the whole life cycle of medicines research, from basic science through clinical development to pharmacovigilance.

EMIF

European Bank for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells – EbiSC

EBiSC has been designed to address the increasing demand for quality-controlled, disease-relevant, research-grade iPSC lines, data and cell services. It is a centralised, not-for-profit iPSC bank providing researchers across academia and industry with access to scalable, cost-efficient and consistent, high quality tools for new medicines development. EBiSC is a large European public-private partnership project coordinated by Pfizer Ltd and managed by Roslin Cells Siences Ltd. and supported jointly by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and members of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL-EBI are both partners in the consortium.https://www.ebisc.org/

Global Alliance for Genomics in Health

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (Global Alliance) was formed to help accelerate the potential of genomic medicine to advance human health. It brings together over 400 leading institutions working in healthcare, research, disease advocacy, life science, and information technology. The partners in the Global Alliance are working together to create a common framework of harmonized approaches to enable the responsible, voluntary, and secure sharing of genomic and clinical data.

TransPLANT

TransPLANT is a European-Union funded e-infrastructure to support computational analysis of genomic data from crop and model plants. It is a consortium of 11 European partners including EMBL-EBI. The project funds coordination and research activities; and provides free access to tools, training and data standards. The transPLANT project is funded by the European Commissionhttp://www.transplantdb.eu/

The International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC)

The IMPC is currently composed of 18 research institutions, including EMBL-EBI and the Sanger Institute and 5 national funders The Consortium’s goal is to develop a plan to harness the major world-wide mouse research programmes and infrastructures in a strategic and coordinated effort to undertake a broad-based, systematic genome-wide phenotyping project of knockout mice in order to provide the wider research community with a long-lasting resource of mammalian gene function information.http://www.mousephenotype.org

Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research – (EHR4CR)

The IMI EHR4CR project runs over five years (2011-2015) and involves 34 partners (academic and industrial) including EMBL-EBI. The EHR4CR project is one of the largest public-private partnerships aiming at providing adaptable, reusable and scalable solutions (tools and services) for reusing data from Electronic Health Record systems for Clinical Research. Electronic Health Record (EHR) data offer large opportunities for the advancement of medical research, the improvement of healthcare, and the enhancement of patient safety. The project is partially funded by the IMI programme. The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is Europe’s largest public-private initiative aiming to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients. IMI supports collaborative research projects and builds networks of industrial and academic experts in order to boost pharmaceutical innovation in Europe. IMI is a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA.http://www.ehr4cr.eu

The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC)

The goal of the ICGC is to obtain a comprehensive description of genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic changes in 50 different tumor types and/or subtypes which are of clinical and societal importance across the globe. Currently, the ICGC has received commitments from funding organizations in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America for 88 project teams in 17 jurisdictions to study over 25,000 tumor genomes.http://icgc.org/

eTOX

The eTOX project aims to develop a drug safety database from the pharmaceutical industry legacy toxicology reports and public toxicology data; innovative in silico strategies and novel software tools to better predict the toxicological profiles of small molecules in early stages of the drug development pipeline. eTOX, is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking, a unique partnership between the European Community and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).http://www.etoxproject.eu/

EU-AIMS

A large-scale drug-discovery collaboration that brings together academic and industrial R&D with patient organisations to develop and assess novel treatment approaches for autism.http://www.eu-aims.eu/

Open PHACTS

the Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple Store: Reducing barriers to drug discovery in industry, academia and for small businesses.https://www.openphacts.org/

Campus Life

Our beautiful Campus is a hub for visitors from around the world and offers a stimulating working environment with world class facilities including restaurants, cafes, a gym, many acres of beautifully maintained grounds, a state-of- the-art conference centre and a children’s nursery.